Multiple Sites Duplicate Content Best Practice
-
Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas.
I.e. (widgetmakersinmarietta.com)
-
Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed?
-
Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point.
3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh?
Thanks everyone.
-
-
_A tough choice. As the geo specific sites are not Country code top-level domains, it will be all the more difficult for you to make Google understand that the purpose of launching these websites is to serve the local targeted readers. It might even look like an attempt of domain farming whose main purpose is to rank high in location specific keywords by launching keywords rich domains.
If your business has physical business address in these locations, you can submit your business details in Google Places. And of course you are free to create location specific pages in your main website given the fact that you are adding some interesting details there. No stuffing of keywords or rehash content just to get higher rankings in competitive terms. _
-
If main and duplicate sites are already indexed then I would suggest implementing canonical element on the duplicate sites with the main site URLs as preferred URLs.
New pages can be blocked by adding "noindex" on the page.
All the best !
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best Practice for Blocking a site from 1 countries search engines
A client cannot appear in any search engines in one given country but they are ok in rest of the world. Has anybody had any experience blocking a site from appearing in just google.de, bing.de and yahoo.de for example?
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
Best practice for multiple domain links
A site i'm working on has about 12 language domains - .es, it, .de etc. On each page of every domain the header has links to every homepage. At the moment these are all set to no-follow as an initial step to stop potential link profile issues spreading around. Moving forward i'm not totally sure how to handle these links. On one side I see and agree that no-follow is not necessary, but do-follow is just filtering out and weakening link juice. What is the best way to handle this scenario?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
How different does content need to be to avoid a duplicate content penalty?
I'm implementing landing pages that are optimized for specific keywords. Some of them are substantially the same as another page (perhaps 10-15 words different). Are the landing pages likely to be identified by search engines as duplicate content? How different do two pages need to be to avoid the duplicate penalty?
Technical SEO | | WayneBlankenbeckler0 -
Industry News Page Best Practices
Hi, We have created an industry news page which automatically curates articles from specific news sources within our sector. Currently, I have the news index page set to be indexed and followed by robots. I have the article pages noindex, nofollow, since these are not original content. Is this the best practice or do you recommend another configuration? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JoshGFialkoff0 -
ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages. We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?. General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Duplicate Content on Navigation Structures
Hello SEOMoz Team, My organization is making a push to have a seamless navigation across all of its domains. Each of the domains publishes distinctly different content about various subjects. We want each of the domains to have its own separate identity as viewed by Google. It has been suggested internally that we keep the exact same navigation structure (40-50 links in the header) across the header of each of our 15 domains to ensure "unity" among all of the sites. Will this create a problem with duplicate content in the form of the menu structure, and will this cause Google to not consider the domains as being separate from each other? Thanks, Richard Robbins
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0